I woke to sunlight that did not threaten to cut me. The bed beneath me was firm and clean. My side still ached where the goliath had taken a piece of me, but the pain was dull and manageable. The inn smelled of steeped tea and fresh bread. Yuki sat on the floor beside the bed, legs crossed, watching the door as if she expected someone to walk through it with a story to sell.
"You awake," she said.
"Barely," I answered, pushing the sheet back and testing my weight. "You stayed."
She shrugged and tilted her head. "You passed out on my floor. My back is better than your conscience. I could leave, but it is not polite."
I tried to sit up. The room swam for a second. Yuki reached out and steadied me with a hand that was calm and sure. Her grip did not squeeze. It was a small fact that said she knew how to move around bodies and not break them.
"What happened out there?" she asked. Her voice had the same low tone that cut through the goliath. It sounded casual and dangerous at once.
"You saved me," I said. "You killed the goliath."
"Correct," she said. "And you almost paid for curiosity with a mouthful of stone. Why were you there with a merchant's wagon and a crew that could turn on you?"
I told her what I could. I left out the parts that tasted like shame. I told her about Alen's promise and the route. I told her about the fights up to Floor One Hundred Ninety Nine. I did not tell her how the blade under my cloak had thrummed like a heart and how the Ascender's slate still blinked its numbers against my ribs.
When I finished she listened without judgement. Her eyes moved the way a hunter's eyes move across a field. Curious then practical, then bored.
"Tell me about Kuraihane," she said after a long moment.
I closed my mouth. I had been careful with the sword. I had been careful with its name. The room felt thinner when I said it aloud.
"I will have to choose what to tell you," I said.
She considered that, then smiled a little. "I work with things that shout and scream and refuse to be orderly. If you hide a weapon that bleeds the world, I will notice eventually. You saved your life today. The Spire is a ledger. It will remember you."
I asked a question I had been circling since the moment she cut the goliath down. "Are you dangerous?"
She did not answer right away. She uncrossed her legs and stood, walking to the window. She rested her palm against the glass and watched the market below where people bargained as if fate were a coin.
"Dangerous is a word people use to describe what they do not understand," she said. "I am competent. I am selective. I do my work because someone must. I am a Floorwalker. That means I climb farther than most and I keep certain lines tidy. That requires skill. You want a faster answer."
I nodded.
She turned, and the light caught a line of pale scars along her forearm. They were thin and tidy like someone who knew how to punish a blade and not be punished by it.
"I will not hurt you for the fun of it," she said. "I will hurt you if you are a threat to the people I watch. I will hurt the Spire if it insists on growing teeth in places it should not. If you keep a relic hidden on your chest and it sings to the world, I will come. I will not kill you simply for having it. But I will make a ledger for you. That is not the same as mercy."
I let that sit. The sentences had weight and a condition. In this city, conditions were how survival worked.
"Why help me?" I asked finally. It was not just curiosity. I wanted to know whether debt or interest tied me to her.
She shrugged. "I was passing through. You were inconvenient and amused me. Also the goliath's mutation was wrong in a way that made me curious. Echo signatures leave a taste in the stones. I followed that taste and found you. You are not the first idiot with a relic, but you may be the first one this season with a spine."
We talked more. She told me about Floorwalkers in pieces and fragments. They were not a single brotherhood. They were individuals who had climbed, kept a ledger, sometimes served guilds, sometimes worked for themselves. A Floorwalker could be a scholar or a murderer or both. Yuki's version leaned toward a pragmatic historian who kept blades in readiness.
"Do you have allies?" I asked.
"Some," she said. "Names mean less than actions. If you want protection you do not ask strangers on rooftops. You earn a place to be covered. And you keep your mouth shut."
I wanted to press on the last point, to ask whether she would tell the guild or the Ascenders. I stopped. The slate against my ribs pulsed faintly like a heartbeat. Secrets had a way of becoming tax liabilities.
She poured me tea from a cracked cup and brewed it strong, the kind of bitter that sharpened thinking. We ate small bread and preserved fruit. The inn's keeper kept us in silence, not nosy, not forced. The hours passed in the quiet company of two people who had seen what the Spire could take and learned to avoid being taken next.
When I asked about her past she gave me fragments. She had once been sponsored by a guild house before she left. She had seen the Spire's depths and had a scar to prove it. She did not like to talk about the floors beyond two thousand because even her voice changed when she said those numbers.
"Have you ever reached the fifteen thousand floor?" I asked, because the rumor of the vanished Floorwalker had a name like a ghost.
She went still. "No. Whoever left that mark did something that is not polite to speak about. There are lines even Floorwalkers are careful with."
I tested her in small ways. I asked about blade techniques and she demonstrated a move that cut a ribbon of cloth in the air without nicking a nearby lantern. I asked about traps and she produced a small rune probe that sang under her palm. Her hands were sure. She tasted of competence like a person who had slept in armor and not in comfort.
When the afternoon faded she stood and tied her cloak. She did not ask me to come. She told me to rest and to keep the sword wrapped. Then she did something I had not expected. She left a small strip of cloth folded on my bedside table.
"If the Spire hums at night and you cannot sleep," she said, "tie that around your wrist. It will keep your hand steady. Watch your nightmares. They will be loud for a while."
I put the cloth on. It smelled faintly of winter and pine and the oil of a sharpened blade. It felt like a sigil not printed on paper but on skin.
Before she left she paused and looked back at me. "You will have to decide soon whether you are going to climb or bury the sword. Either choice will have consequences. I help no one who cannot decide for themselves."
She walked out without another word. The doorway swallowed her and the market below carried on. I lay back in the bed and thought about the ledger and the way the Spire kept accounts in more ways than coin. For the first time I felt not only hunger but a strange sense of direction.
I closed my eyes and the inn kept me. Yuki's presence on the floor below felt like a watchful thing, not a judge. Morning would come and with it choices. For now I had tea in my throat, a cloth around my wrist, and the knowledge that if Yuki was dangerous she was, at least, selective.